


Jigsaw

by erinome



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Drug Use, Fix-It, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-18
Updated: 2017-01-21
Packaged: 2018-09-18 07:08:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9373631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erinome/pseuds/erinome
Summary: For the people who felt let down by series 4/that finale, I've been inspired to write something of a fix-it fic involving gratuitous retconning of the events following series 3. Prepare for a bit of angst bc I'm incapable of writing entirely fluffy things, but don't worry, I'm averse to unhappy endings.Sherlock wakes up in hospital after being shot by Mary in His Last Vow, and finds himself missing someone who's never existed. John deals with his own recent traumas. Together, they try adjust to life back at Baker Street.





	1. Chapter 1

“It’s not—real, then.”

Mycroft is peering at him from under raised eyebrows. “A secret sister capable of mind control locked away in a maximum-security island prison? No, Dr. Watson.”

“It’s just that. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time you’d hidden some mad—conspiracy sort of thing from us.”

Mycroft’s head tilts a fraction up, almost curious.

“From Sherlock, I mean,” John clarifies.

“I am afraid you overestimate me, John.” The name is delivered with a certain intentionality, a sharp-edged enunciation.

“Then what? He’s just drugged up? Where’s he getting all this?”

“My brother has not been fully conscious for weeks. He was clinically dead for several minutes—“

“Yeah, I know!” It comes out quicker and more harshly then John intended. He clears his throat. “I’m aware of that.”

“You mustn’t blame yourself, Dr. Watson.”

“Why? Don’t you?” John swallows. “I married her.”

There’s a drawn-out pause. Mycroft seems to have turned to studying something on one of the floor tiles, eyes down, lips pulled together and frowning slightly.

“Eurus,” he says suddenly, without looking up. “One of Sherlock’s little fictions. A baby sister that was even cleverer than I was. He so hated being the stupid one.”

“An imaginary friend,” John fills in slowly.

“After a fashion.”

“What about the others? Redbeard?”

Mycroft glances up at that, smiling wryly. “The family dog, I’m afraid.”

“What about Victor, or Trevor, or whoever?”

Mycroft’s eyebrows snap down, but his voice is still level and contained when he speaks. “Why, what did he say about him?”

“Something about realizing Eurus put him in a well, or something.”

Mycroft’s lips purse and then slowly relax.

“So,” John prompts, “another imaginary friend?”

“No.”

There’s another brief pause.

“Right. Who was he, then?”

Mycroft’s back to the floor tile. “I’ll leave it to Sherlock to fill you in, when he’s well enough.”

“One more: Rosie? He keeps going on.”

A final ghostly smile. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

 

It’s meant to be happy, isn’t it? Mrs. Hudson cries, when John tells her over the phone, then again at Sherlock’s bedside, holding one each of their hands and blubbering at intervals in either direction. Molly’s beaming and teary-eyed at her first visit, does a fair amount of patting uncertainly at Sherlock’s arms and leaves a bouquet of slightly wilting daisies and a card depicting a teddy bear holding heart-shaped “get well” balloons in her wake. Greg brings a bulging manila file of cold cases. His eyes linger on the daisies.

“Molly?” he asks, and John gives a short nod. “Hm. Crossed my mind, you know, but I figured Sherlock wouldn’t really want flowers from me.”

It’s days before John really _sees_ Sherlock in the man in the bed. He’s in and out of consciousness, still, only makes any sense occasionally, sometimes seems to wake up but doesn’t speak or respond at all.

He’s on a lot of morphine. That’s one of the explanations John’s given, for why sometimes Sherlock seems relatively coherent, if drained, and sometimes babbles on about an odd fantasy he seems to expect John to know his way around already.

It’s a miracle, really, John’s told. They’d given him up—trust Sherlock Holmes to restart his own heart. A miracle that he’d lived. A miracle that he can put together sentences after being dead for two minutes.

Their first real conversation comes a week after he shows his first promising signs of awareness. John’s sitting on the side of the bed, Sherlock’s right hand across his lap, absentmindedly working on the range-of-motion exercises that have become a sort of coping mechanism during the long, silent hours at the hospital.

“Where’s Rosie?”

John looks up, startled, wondering if he’s only just woken up.

“I, er. Don’t know who that is, Sherlock.” He places Sherlock’s hand back on the sheet, scooting a few inches down the bed. He has that familiar feeling of being studied, Sherlock’s wary, unflinching gaze fixed on him.

Finally Sherlock looks away, letting out a breath, shifting slightly against the pillows. “Could you put the bed up?”

John obligingly leans forward to press the button under the rail, raising the head thirty degrees or so. “Do you need a nurse?”

“No,” Sherlock says, and John’s surprised to find himself feeling slightly relieved.

“Water?” he offers.

Sherlock studies him a moment longer. “I made it all up, then,” he says, in lieu of an answer.

“Well, you spent a long time semi-conscious,” John allows. “It’s not unusual for coma patients to have…sort of vivid, elaborate dreams.”

Sherlock says something too low for John to hear.

“What’s that?”

“Too vivid.” His voice is still soft. “I can’t untangle it all.”

There’s a lump in John’s throat. “You don’t have to, not right now,” he says gently. “Just focus on being back here with us.”

A frown ghosts across Sherlock’s features, giving way to something that faintly resembles a smile. He braces himself on his wrists and pushes himself gingerly up a bit further, arms shaking with the effort. “God,” he says, sounding out of breath, “I die one time, and you go all sentimental on me.” It’s warm.

John’s startled into a laugh that sounds more like a sob than he’d like it. “It’s been twice,” he manages, accusingly, “you utter clot.”

“Sorry,” Sherlock says, low, and John’s brief mirth fades.

“So,” Sherlock starts, when the silence has grown long enough to be tense. “Mary?”

Her name feels like a slap. “Mycroft’s got people—dealing with her.”

“On what grounds?”

“On the grounds of double goddamn homicide!”

Sherlock’s wince is almost enough to make John regret his tone.

“How long did you know?” he asks, quieter.

“Know what?”

“Don’t play dumb.”

Sherlock takes a shaky breath. “I’m barely sure of my own name, at the moment.”

There’s a little twinge of guilt beneath John’s sternum, but he tamps it down, dismissing the answer with a little shake of his head.

“I realized she wasn’t who she said she was… early,” Sherlock says finally. “But I never thought—John, I never realized—“ he catches his lips between his teeth, troubled. “There are plenty of reasons that people leave their pasts behind. I had no cause to assume that she was something so…” he trails off.

“Murderous?” John offers, bitter.

“Well, she hasn’t necessarily murdered anyone,” Sherlock says, far too reasonably.

“She murdered you!” John bursts out, and then, pulling himself back, “she’s murdered plenty of people, according to your brother. World class assassin, my wife.”

Something like recognition is dawning in Sherlock’s expression, a distracted sort of comprehension. “Assassin—of course,” he murmurs, almost to himself.

“Of course,” John repeats hollowly.

“Hang on, you said double homicide.”

“Well, yeah. You and Magnussen.”

“Magnussen,” Sherlock breathes. “He’s dead?”

John swallows. Despite how painful it is, going back to that night, there’s a sick relief in watching Sherlock _think_ , watching the cogs turn. There were a few moments, there—well. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

“John?”

“Ah—yeah. Pretty dead.”

“She can’t’ve been all bad, then.” Sherlock’s almost smiling at him, careful, the way you might look at a child on the verge of breaking down.

John looks down at his hands, chewing on his bottom lip. He has to stay patient for this; it’s _Sherlock_ , interested and talking and still, somehow, entirely himself. This is the miracle. This is the part where he sucks it up and stays grateful, despite everything.

“She _was_ pregnant, though?”

John meets Sherlock’s gaze once again, feeling like his insides have been scooped out. “Who the hell knows?” he says bitterly. “Probably just another trick.”

“They haven’t caught her yet?”

“I told Mycroft not to tell me anything unless it was—well.” He can’t say it, can’t hate her enough, can only hate himself for still caring.

“She’s still out there somewhere.” There’s something new in Sherlock’s voice, a thread of urgency. John really looks at him for the first time in a few minutes, notices the pinched set of his eyes and forehead, pain and exhaustion written across his pale features.

“You need to rest,” John tells him, standing up and laying the bed horizontal again. “I shouldn’t have kept you talking this long.”

To his dismay, Sherlock’s lucidity seems to be slipping away as quickly as it came on. John can see his chest rising and falling, quick, shallow breaths, can read the tension in his lips.

“Sherlock,” he says, “you know she can’t get to you in here, right? I’m not leaving you alone.”

It doesn’t seem to register.

“She’s still,” Sherlock repeats, then stops. “Rosie,” he says again, voice small and almost childlike.

“Shh, shh. Just relax, okay?” John squeezes Sherlock’s wrist gently a few times. “Rest now. We’ll talk about it later.”

To his relief, Sherlock seems to concede, gaze fixed on John as he lets his eyes drift closed.


	2. Chapter 2

Five weeks exactly from the day John’s wife shot him in the chest, Sherlock is released from hospital. They take him down to the curb in a wheelchair that he accepts with far too little complaint for John’s taste. He’s shaky on his feet as John helps him into the waiting cab, leans into John’s hand under his elbow as they make their slow way up the stairs at Baker Street. Mrs. Hudson fusses around them, following them into 221B with a tray of tea and cheese crackers.

“Oh, it _is_ good to have you back,” she effuses. “You boys just tell me anything you need, anything I can do to make things easier on you.”

“John,” Sherlock says, apparently choosing to ignore her, “did you get the oxycodone I asked for?”

“Thank you, Mrs. Hudson,” John says pointedly, pulling a small paper sack from the overnight bag he’d had at the hospital and handing it to Sherlock.

Sherlock has the rattling orange bottle free of the sack in an instant, scanning the text on the label. “This is tramadol,” he says, indignant.

“Well,” John says curtly, “you’ve got a reputation.”

Sherlock shoves the bottle back into the sack and tosses it contemptuously in the direction of the desk. “It won’t do a thing for me,” he declares.

Is it a good thing that John’s retrieved the ability to feel like throttling him?

“I’ll be downstairs, if you need me,” Mrs. Hudson says, half-apologetic, and hurries out.

 

At three-thirty that afternoon, John catches Sherlock crawling under the desk to retrieve the abandoned pill bottle. John watches, half-obscured by the kitchen doors, as Sherlock shakes several caplets into the palm of his hand and swallows them dry, feels a twinge of worry at the way he sinks back into the chair, letting his head fall back, knuckles white where he’s gripping the armrests. John can’t address it, can’t really react, even. As likely as not, he realizes bitterly, it’s a charade for his own benefit. Sherlock’s a gifted manipulator, and he knows exactly how to play John’s guilt complex.

By seven o’clock, though, John’s worry has grown into an actionable thing. Sherlock initially turns down supper, but gives in to John’s very first round of badgering, comes slowly over to the table in the kitchen where John’s laid out bowls of chicken soup, trailing a hand along the wall for support. He picks dutifully at the meal, although the level of the broth, which has dropped about a centimeter in the bowl, doesn’t satisfy John’s concern.

“Do you want something else?” John finds himself asking.

“No, this is. Good. Thank you.”

The placatory politeness in Sherlock’s tone is the most worrisome thing yet. That is, until he lowers his head down onto the table next to his soup and presses his eyes shut.

John’s spoon freezes halfway to his mouth. “Sherlock?” No response. He sets the spoon down, pushes his chair back and gets to his feet, rounding the table. “Sherlock, talk to me.”

“I think,” Sherlock says faintly, without opening his eyes, “I should lie down.”

“Yeah, good,” John agrees, reaching around to help him up.

Rather than get to his feet, though, Sherlock slithers downward, off the chair and onto the sticky linoleum, where he ends up curled on his side, arms wrapped around his midsection. His face is drawn, skin ashen. John crouches next to him, feeling for the pulse on the side of his neck. It’s fainter than he’d like, but steady.

“‘M okay,” Sherlock asserts unconvincingly.

John comes around to his front side, pushing the table back. “Let me check the incision.”

Sherlock’s mouth twitches with something like annoyance, but he opens his arms obligingly, letting John pull open his dressing gown and ruck up the baggy t-shirt beneath it. The initial wound is only a punctuation mark next to the long, shiny pink sternotomy scar running the length of his ribcage. John runs a finger lightly alongside it, feeling for heat, then probes gently at Sherlock’s exposed belly with four fingers. He can find no immediately alarming signs there, but that isn’t stopping his concern.

“I’m not bleeding,” Sherlock tells him, finally opening his eyes half-way as if it might make him more convincing. “Promise.” When John doesn’t reply, he adds, quietly, “I just hurt.”

“I should take you back in to get looked at.”

Sherlock manages an eyeroll. “Oh, come on,” he says, and then adds, “I’ve got my doctor right here, don’t I?”

“If you’ve torn something underneath the incision—“

“I haven’t,” Sherlock breaks over him, firm despite the weakness of his voice. “I promised, didn’t I?”

“I don’t know how you’d be certain.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Sherlock points out, “that I’ve bled internally.”

John rocks back on his heels, conflicted.

“If I can get myself to the bed,” Sherlock says, eyes fluttering closed again, “will you believe me?”

“No.”

Sherlock levers himself up on one arm anyway, and John hurries to support him, helping him to sit up and then gingerly rise to his feet. John has him around the waist, pinning both of Sherlock’s elbows to his sides so he doesn’t pull at the healing skin and bone surrounding the most vital parts of him. They make their slow way to the bedroom like that, Sherlock submitting to the support without complaint.

John relents, when he’s got Sherlock settled in the bed, calls Mrs. Hudson up to keep watch and makes a late run to the pharmacy. He should have known he wouldn’t last.

It’s nearly eight when he returns to take over from her, bearing a glass of water and a single pill. Sherlock sits up halfway to take it, thanking John in a quiet, earnest way that doesn’t make him feel any better. It is mollifying, though, to watch Sherlock’s brow gradually unknot as he drifts back to sleep, his shallow breaths stretching out into a deep, even rhythm. John retrieves a glass and the bottle of scotch from the cabinet next to the stove and posts himself in the chair next to Sherlock’s bed, resting his socked feet on the edge of the mattress. He tracks Sherlock’s slow breathing as he sits there, trying to match his own to it, trying to ignore the sense of a heavy something sitting on his chest. When at last his eyelids begin to droop with exhaustion, John crawls into the bed behind Sherlock, reaching across him to wrap his fingers around his wrist, three fingers over the reassuring pulse point there.

_He’ll heal_ , he finds himself thinking, _we’ll heal._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't promise to keep up a new-chapter-a-day schedule, but this thing's still pouring out of me, so there's more to come soon! Thanks for the comments and kudos <3 knowing people are reading keeps me inspired.


	3. Chapter 3

Sherlock does heal. Some parts of him more quickly than others.

After the third night back, John can’t find a real justification to sleep in Sherlock’s bedroom any longer. He makes a habit of reading late in the living room and nodding off on the couch or in the armchair there. It’s more comforting than he’d like to admit to stay within earshot, although Sherlock usually doesn’t emerge from his room until morning.

Eventually, John can’t tell how long it’s been since Sherlock’s last painkiller by the shade of color in his cheeks and the lines around his eyes; eventually Sherlock starts looking generally hale, despite the lingering weakness that won’t let him climb the stairs without stopping for breath. John doesn’t confiscate the oxycodone—there’s not enough of it, he reasons, for Sherlock to do any real damage. Mostly, he just lacks the energy to take it away from him.

He can still tell when Sherlock’s self-medicated, by the dilation of his pupils, by the sudden lightness in how he carries himself, by the way he speaks, an almost whimsical lilt to his voice. John’s not entirely sure it’s only the prescription, now, effecting this change in mood, but he finds himself ever unwilling to confront the thought fully. They’re both…coping, on some level.

Sherlock’s looser-tongued, too, in these moods, more inclined to answer questions, more inclined to share what he remembers of his strange coma dream than he has since he’d been convinced in hospital that that was all it was. He tells John about the sister, more than anything else, considerately avoids telling John more about Mary’s role, although John knows from his hospital ramblings that Mary had died, and died a hero, in Sherlocks fictive timeline.

“You really do dream in technicolor, don’t you?” John remarks once, after listening to an astonishingly detailed description of Eurus’ various disguises. “Sounds like a movie.”

Sherlock purses his lips, looking pensively down at the rug between them. “It felt…very real,” he says, sounding far away. “Sometimes it still does,” he adds, like he’s confessing to something. “Sometimes I wake up expecting to see—“ he hesitates— “people who aren’t here,” he finishes cryptically.

_Rosie_ , John thinks. Sherlock hasn’t said the name since that conversation in the hospital, and John hasn’t pressed. She’s clearly some important piece from Sherlock’s dream, one that he hasn’t come around to sharing. John resolves to be there, when he’s ready.

 

On Wednesday, John gets back from the grocery store to find Mycroft on the landing.

“Ah, Doctor Watson,” Mycroft says, by way of a greeting.

“Hullo,” John says, shifting the plastic bag back so that it’s resting in the crook of his palm, rather than suspended from his fingertips. The _what are you doing here_ is implied.

“I’ve just been—” “Leaving,” Sherlock cuts over him, as Mycroft finishes, “—checking in.”

Mycroft glances from Sherlock back to John. “Yes,” he says, smiling thinly. “If you’ll excuse me,” and he’s gone.

“What was that about?” John asks Sherlock, after the front door clicks shut.

Sherlock gestures vaguely after his brother. “As he said,” he says absentmindedly, “checking in.”

They don’t speak more about it.

 

On Thursday, Sherlock deposits something on the desk in the living room as he breezes past to turn the kettle on. John edges toward it to find the file Lestrade dropped off at Sherlock’s bedside.

“Been working on cases, have you?” he asks lightly.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“And how’s that going?”

Sherlock waves a hand dismissively. “Child’s play. Took me the lesser half of an afternoon.”

“Right.” John clears his throat. “You going back to work?” he asks, trying for a light tone.

Sherlock makes a face. “Going back to work,” he repeats. “Whatever that means.”

 

On Friday, John jolts awake in the wee hours of the morning to screams. He stumbles to his feet, catching himself on the coffee table.

“Sherlock?” he calls, before he even has the door open.

Sherlock is thrashing on the bed, thrusting a clenched fist into the fitted sheet. The covers are in a heap on the floor.

“Sherlock!” he says again.

John thinks he hears a _Rosie_ between the animalistic cries. He reaches over, taking Sherlock’s shoulder in one hand and giving him a firm shake.

Sherlock comes awake suddenly, with a gasp. “John?” he says, on an intake of breath.

“I’m right here,” John says.

Sherlock’s hand darts out almost too fast for John to comprehend it, locking around John’s wrist. “John,” he repeats urgently. His eyes rove around the dim room, finally fixing on John’s. “Rosie?” he asks, as if John ought to know what he wants to hear, and John feels pitifully inadequate, all at once.

“I don’t,” he starts, “I don’t know who that is.”

Sherlock doesn’t seem to hear him, struggling to sit up, still keeping his vice grip around John’s arm.

“Hey, easy,” John says, pushing him back, tugging his wrist gently free so he can take Sherlock’s hand instead. “You just had a nightmare, hm?”

Sherlock fixes his gaze on their joined hands long enough that John begins to feel self-conscious, then lets his head fall back against the pillows. “Just a nightmare,” he repeats.

They sit quietly for a minute or so, and John watches the quick rise and fall of Sherlock’s chest slowing until he’s breathing at a normal rate. “Were you back in the—other place?” John asks eventually.

Sherlock nods, untidy black curls catching on the fabric of the pillow. His hair is longer than John’s seen it, taken on an extra inch or two in the time since they visited Magnussen’s office. It makes him look young, freer somehow.

John clears his throat, steeling himself to speak what’s been on his mind for nearly a month. “You were in love,” he says, only half a question.

Sherlock’s eyes dart furtively to meet his; for a moment John thinks he looks like a caged animal, wary and caught. He doesn’t affirm or deny the statement.

“Who was she?”

Sherlock’s expression changes, at that, brow lowering with careful confusion. “She?” he repeats.

“Rosie.”

Sherlock’s mouth works a little, and his Adam’s apple bobs in a swallow. “Rosie was my, ah. She was your daughter.”

It’s John’s turn for confusion: he straightens up, releasing Sherlock’s hand. His _daughter—_ he hadn’t even considered. He remembers the intensity with which Sherlock had asked about Mary’s pregnancy when he’d woken up, his seeming discontent with John’s dismissal of the question. It’s not like it’s never crossed John’s mind, the possibility of his unborn child, wrapped inextricably together with the woman he’s trying desperately to hate. As a matter of fact, he’s been carefully avoiding the thought.

The idea, now, makes something lurch in his chest. Sherlock has imagined up and given a name to his child, a daughter, full-fledged enough to be the first word from his lips upon waking. It occurs to John for the first time to wonder about the timespan of Sherlock’s dream, and just how much of it Sherlock has been keeping from him for his own peace of mind. He finds he can’t quite bring himself to press further.

“D’you think you can go back to sleep?”

Sherlock shrugs a little.

“Want me to stay?” The question tumbles off John’s lips unbidden, _stay_ , like a mercurial lover.

For a long moment Sherlock offers no response, and it occurs to some desperate, adolescent part of John that _that’s not good enough_ , it has to be enthusiastically yes or else it’s a flat out rejection. He reels his emotional response in just in time for Sherlock to nod minutely, just in time to feel a wash of relief. It’s _yes_ , then, it’s _yes_ and that same part of John that flickered briefly jaded and distrustful is jubilant: Sherlock letting himself be vulnerable enough to deliberately assent in any way to companionship feels like a victory.

John shucks off his jumper before he climbs into the bed beside him. Despite the fact that it’s far from the first night they’ve spent this way, something feels different, some huge shift in the cosmos that’s led to them both choosing this. Sherlock turns halfway over, acknowledging John’s presence with a brief glance, and then turns away again.

John rolls onto his back, grateful for the warm bed after having spent the first part of the night half-upright in his armchair. For the first time, he allows himself to dwell on the thought of Mary, to wonder where she is, to wonder about the life that might at that very moment be forming and differentiating inside her, a piece of himself so hopelessly bound to her.

Sherlock’s breathing settles into an even rhythm quickly; John lets himself lie and listen to it, _almost lost_ but here they are, still mostly whole. He’s overcome with a sudden overwhelming impulse to reach out and touch Sherlock, to ground himself somehow. Hesitantly, he stretches out three fingers to graze the first bare skin above the collar of Sherlock’s shirt, at the very top of his back. Much to John’s surprise, Sherlock is evidently not yet asleep: an instant, electric shudder runs visibly through him, and John pulls his hand quickly away, heart racing in a reaction he can’t quite explain to himself.

He doesn’t sleep for a long time.


End file.
